Scar of the Sky

The command room was dark. The blinds had gone down hours ago and stayed down. The room had been built for briefings — one desk, one chair, a projection plane, and four meters of window that could go opaque at a word — and somebody had said the word, and nobody had said the one that brought the sky back. What was left was the star map, turning in slow projection beside the marble desk. Langinus, riding around its artificial sun. Blue, thin, everywhere at once — crossing the face of the man in the chair, sliding off, coming back. Two doors. Both locked, both logged, both in her name. He was still fighting her. Some part of him was, anyway: the officer in him, who had no intention of being held down in his own command chair. His hands kept coming up to her legs, closing on the seams of her trousers, testing. Every few seconds he slid forward, and she hauled him back with her knees. She had come up onto the edge of the marble desk to get him where she wanted him. Her legs were over his shoulders now, ankles crossed behind his neck, and the pressure lived in the last inch of her calves. One of the holds the Federation taught in the second year and printed nowhere. Above the shoulders, ankles crossed — there was no clean version of it. A thigh is stronger than an arm, and she had never needed the ugly half of it before tonight. The Empire had been trying to kill this man for years. She had him between her legs, and it would take an inch. She looked down at him. The white dress coat had torn open over the shirt beneath it, and the black hair was stuck flat to his forehead with sweat, and the blue eyes were turned up at her with nothing behind them. “If you keep fighting me, sir, I’ll have to tie you up.” She said it low, and close to his ear, and neither of those was for his benefit. There was a night watch on this deck, and a raised voice in a flag command room was the kind of thing people repeated. So it came out soft, and warm, at the volume you use on a man you have just pulled out of the water. It was a threat. He stopped. Just like that — shoulders down, hands open, jaw slack, all of him settling back into the black leather as though somebody had posed him there. His white cap lay on the carpet where it had fallen. Nobody bent for it. Nobody was going to. Her back had begun to ache holding the angle, and her temple had started up underneath that, and there was a stack of unsigned paper on the floor where she had pushed it to make room for herself. When his hands came onto her leg again, slower this time and with no strength in them, she rubbed the ache with two fingers and looked at him. “I told you, sir. Move again and I’ll tie you. You don’t think I’m joking.” She tapped her thumbnail twice against the metal of her belt buckle. Two small, cold clicks. His hands came off her leg. Then they came back and closed around her calf and stayed there, holding on the way a man holds a rail — and whatever the officer in him had been fighting for, he had stopped keeping the tally. She let out a breath, drew her knees back an inch, and hauled him up in the chair so he wouldn’t slide off it onto the floor. A split skull was a conversation she did not want to have. Then she put her free hand into his hair. For the obedience, which was a poor reason and the only one she had: combing the black strands back off his forehead, letting them slide out between her fingers until his face was bare under the blue. “Mmm,” he said. Then he turned his face up into her palm and rubbed against it, clumsy and eager, his mouth open on the heel of her hand. She took her hand away. He followed it with his chin. His throat moved. The smell in the room came up thick enough to feel at the back of her tongue. Honey first, the slow heavy kind, poured over ice. Tea underneath, bitter, bergamot, cutting through the cold. Juniper laid over the top of both, clear and cold, sinking. She breathed in through her nose and let the layers come apart. “Earl Grey,” she said. “Gin. Honey.” She closed her eyes on it, and the room rolled over into another room: a low ceiling, three lamps too orange for the tables, a basement bar down the south stairs from the academy where the cadets went on the nights they got past the gate. Ice going into a glass. The pour, red-brown, thinning as it rose. A bartender in white gloves who had liked her for reasons she never did work out, sliding the drink across the bar before she asked for it. She had never learned what he called it. “I remember now,” she said, and opened her eyes. “You smell like a cocktail a Beta used to mix for me when he was in a generous mood. I’ve met one other person in my life with chemistry that layered.” “Are you listening?” He was looking up at her. One hand closed loose around her ankle, his head tipped back against the leather, his eyes on her face with a pilgrim’s whole attention, and nothing behind them. No light, no focus; the pupil run wide. His lips were apart and he was breathing too fast and too shallow, and the flush sat high and wrong along his cheekbones. He looked young. He was young. Nobody ever remembered that about him. He didn’t answer. She noted it and let it go. Bad timing, and no listener in this room who was going to be able to repeat a word of it back in an hour. “All right,” she said. “I was only trying to get you to relax.” “Let’s be quick about it.” She stayed where she was and turned at the waist, one hand fisted in the shoulder of his shirt, and dragged the case across the marble by its handle. Gray, matte, unmarked, with a fingerprint plate along the seam. Her thumb on the plate; three green ticks; the lid came up. A syringe still in its paper. Three ampoules standing in foam, glass, clear as meltwater. Two packets of disposable gloves. Three weeks ago she had signed for this case, this office, and this problem, across a page of transfer orders and medical waivers and one paragraph of nondisclosure language that never used the word Omega. The signature at the bottom was hers. She had known exactly what she was signing. She pulled the gloves on, snapped the neck off the first ampoule, and drew the suppressant up into the syringe while the arithmetic ran itself the way it always did. Six sexes. The old two first — male and female, exactly as they’d had them on Earth — and the other three pressed down on top of them. Alphas at the top, where the money and the command and most of the law lived, which nobody had ever had to argue for, because they were built for it. Betas seven in ten of everyone alive and a little more than half of Parliament, an arrangement the Alphas had learned to live with. And then the Omegas. That was all the ampoule held, by the way: heat suppressant. Nothing clever in the chemistry, nothing that changed what he was or fixed what was happening to him. It bought time, and time in this room was all she had left to spend. “Master—” She stopped with the plunger halfway home and looked down. She had had her eyes off him for three minutes at most. In three minutes he had worked his way down the chair until his cheek was on her shin, his lashes wet and clumped, a thin sound in his throat that he did not appear to know about. “What did you call me?” He looked up, pleased with himself, and gave her a smile with no sense anywhere in it. “Master.” She looked at him a while and reached the same conclusion as before. He was sick; that was the whole of it. An Omega in heat — dignity gone, judgment gone, a body that had stopped taking instruction from anything except the chemistry. There was a kind of mercy in that. Nothing done in this chair tonight was going to be his fault. “I’m your subordinate,” she said. “Your aide-de-camp. Not your master, Admiral.” He took the correction the way he took everything, which was to keep looking at her. Rhys Sterling. Twenty-six years old, the youngest admiral the Icarian Federation had ever put in a chair, and the reason Imperial briefings on him ran long: at Langinus alone, more than two hundred thousand Imperial soldiers had died in the taking of it. That was the name. It was lying half out of its own command chair with its cheek on her leg, asking, without a word of it and without stopping, for her hand back in his hair. Then he went quiet, and the light behind his eyes dropped another notch. “I don’t feel good,” he said. “Help me. Please.” She set the syringe down on the marble. If he was past the point where a word landed, then one ampoule was not going to be the thing that fixed tonight, and she would be calling medical into a room where no medic was allowed to be — and by morning the fleet would know the one thing she had spent three weeks arranging for it not to know. She tipped forward at the waist, caught his chin between her thumb and forefinger, and lifted it until his eyes had nowhere to go but her face. “Look at me. Do you know who I am?” He turned his head in her grip, faintly puzzled, as though the question had an obvious answer. “Master.” “Say my name.” He took that for the game it evidently was to him — a game with prizes in it — and he didn’t stop to think, because there wasn’t much left to stop and think with. “Wren.” Good. He knew her. Wrong, but he knew her. She picked the syringe back up. “Roll up your sleeve.” The Federation’s most obedient officer heard her, and did something larger. She had asked for a sleeve. He took the shirt off — one motion, and the garment was over the arm of the chair — and then there was the whole of him to look at, which was more than the job required. The lines of him were clean and long, muscle laid flat and easy under skin that had never been near a sun, and under the blue projection the color of him went past pale into something the eye didn’t want to rest on. He was beautiful the way the fleet’s recruiting posters were beautiful. She noted it, filed it, and let it change nothing about the order of what she had to do next. She found the vein in his right arm, put the needle in, and pushed the suppressant down slow. He blinked. It took a second and a half to arrive, and then he looked down at the needle in his arm without any particular feeling about it. “It hurts,” he said, with so little force behind it that it might have been a request. “Hold still. It’s almost over.” Nobody had to explain heat to her anymore. She had the file memorized. An Omega had a gland at the back of the neck. When it opened, it opened on its own clock, and it put out a hormone that turned heads across a room, a barracks, a whole deck. The body went with it: sensitivity up past any useful threshold, muscle strength down by half, and judgment — the part of a person that weighed a risk and moved before it was too late — taken off the shelf for the duration. What stayed behind was a drive with one direction, and the drive did not care who else was in the room. Which was why the medical board fought the same fight every year about whether an Omega could hold a post at all. If one turned on a deployment — in a bunk room, on a bridge, in a bay with a rifle in both hands — what came for them on the other side of it was not capture. Everyone who had served knew what it was. Nobody said it. Nobody said the word for what happened to a soldier taken alive, either. The suppressants had changed the argument. They had not changed the answer. Most Omegas in uniform worked in the back half of the ship — records, medical, supply — and almost none of them ever saw the front. None of them commanded anything. She watched the plunger go down, steady under her thumb, and let the clock in her head count off what was still owed on tonight: the corridor, where the hour she had bought was nearly out. Under her thumb, the pulse in his arm had already begun to slow. Something was coming back into his eyes. Not much. Not all the way. The Federation had twelve fleets and twelve commanders, and not one of them was an Omega. Rhys Sterling was the only exception it had ever made. Three months ago, he had been a Beta.